Sullivan: Only thing Amazin’ for the Mets on opening day is Sandy’s lofty proclamation

Mets reliever Scott Rice reacts to walking in the tying run in the seventh inning against the Nationals.

NEW YORK – Monday afternoon, underneath clear blue skies and a cold March breeze, the clock officially started on the Mets’ impossible dream. Sandy Alderson wants us to believe this is a 90-win team, and the general manager spent a good portion of his pregame media time defending that claim.

But after watching the Mets crumble in their season-opening loss to the Nationals, a 10-inning 9-7 decision that included too many bullpen meltdowns and too many free-swinging strikeouts, the question doesn’t really seem to be whether the Mets can reach their boss’ lofty goal (logic says they can’t) but what the boss was thinking when he issued such a high standard to begin with.

“What I want to emphasize is that it’s important for us to change the conversation,” Alderson said, his defensive tone matching the chin-thrusting, finger-jabbing posture he took against a wall inside the Mets’ clubhouse.

“This team is now about being successful, and being successful is not some nebulous concept about winning or being competitive or playing meaningful games some month later in the calendar. This is about concrete expectations about what we need to do and so the 90 wins is about a challenge, about changing the conversation, about framing questions for ourselves as to how we get there.”

Alderson is clearly done with the malaise that has enveloped this franchise for too long, and seems hellbent on shaking it out of every employee on his watch. Whether he truly intended his 90-win goal to leak beyond the walls of the internal meeting from which it originated, or whether he is truly annoyed that his internal boast didn’t take long to reach external dissemination, as he seemed Monday, the news is out. The bar is set, and it is set ridiculously high.

If Alderson really believes this is a 90-win team, he should have done more to fill the roster with 90-win players. He should have plugged the leaks in his middle infield instead of settling on Daniel Murphy and Ruben Tejada. He should have signed a reliable power-hitting first baseman, instead waging a war of mediocrity between Ike Davis and Lucas Duda. He should have revamped a bullpen he admitted was the weakest leak last season, instead of relying on the likes of Carlos Torres (one four-pitch RBI walk), Scott Rice (one four-pitch RBI walk), Bobby Parnell (blown save) and Jeurys Familia (losing pitcher of record).

Instead, he framed the season with a stark delineation of success or failure, a hard number that feels like a setup, particularly for embattled manager Terry Collins. There’s nothing wrong with demanding success, and around the Mets, maybe it’s necessary (refreshing?) to hear such a demand for excellence. But doing so without the personnel to back it up (has Rex Ryan gotten to that Super Bowl yet?) can be a fatal mistake.

“What’s wrong with a hard standard?” Alderson said. “To me, the worst thing we can do is have a nebulous notion of ‘gee, let’s try to do this, try to do that.’ We need to turn a corner. It needs to be a 90-degree angle.”

Maybe Alderson is puffing his chest for a reason now, standing behind a team that represents him more than any in his previous three years, one populated with players he signed. He is coming off the most active off-season the cash-strapped Wilpons have allowed him so far, adding Curtis Granderson, Chris Young and Bartolo Colon. If the conversation is going to change, maybe it can start with a few new voices.

And one important old one.

“You obviously take that as a compliment, that he has that sort of faith in his guys because at this point, he’s got a lot of his guys here,” said David Wright, he of the 3-for-5, two-run homer run season opener. “You know that as a player, he’s trying to back up the fact that mediocrity isn’t going to be acceptable. You never set out to say ‘this year it’s going to be par, I want to be mediocre this year.’ That’s not our goal for me individually, or our team. It’s nice that our front office has faith in the players and that kind of rubs off in the clubhouse also.”

Alderson never stood in front of the players and issued a decree, nor did he necessarily intend for them to hear about his 90-win standard the way they did, through a story in the New York Daily News. But he owns the responsibility for it nonetheless: this hard number will define the season from start to finish. The countdown to 90 is on, and already, the Mets failed to get closer.

“We gave this one away today. We flat out gave it away,” Wright said. “For us to accomplish what we want to accomplish, we’re not good enough to be giving games away.”

Not when you have to get to 90.

“If we don’t achieve it, we will have at least achieved the notion that we’re thinking about ourselves differently, we’re setting expectations for ourselves differently,” Alderson said. “And I can tell you that individuals on this team have been thinking in those terms – what do we have to do? The number is out there and for the most part it’s having an immediate impact on how the players on this team think about themselves and think about the team. That was the goal in the first place.”